News from WCER

Congratulations to Matt Hora and The Center for College-Workforce Transitions for receiving $25,000 from the University of Wisconsin System to study how college internships impact student outcomes such as college completion, employment status and wages upon graduation, and vocational self-concept.

The MSAN Institute is a two-day, intensive professional development opportunity dedicated to growing our understanding of how school districts develop equity-focused leadership and nurture cultural competence.

One of the most promising ways to eliminate social, economic and racial gaps in educational achievement is to stop them before they happen. A recent Madison Education Partnership (MEP) report shows the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) may be doing just that through its four-year-old kindergarten (4K) program.

Matthew Hora and colleagues have been awarded $2.2 million from the National Science Foundation to investigate whether four specific competencies – teamwork, communication, problem-solving, and self-directed learning - are being cultivated in college classrooms and workplace training.

David Williamson Shaffer has been awarded a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop and study a tool to let STEM teachers generate models of social, economic, and environmental issues in their own communities.

Erica Halverson and co-investigators from Northcentral Technical College have been awarded a grant of $1.1 million from the National Science Foundation to design, deliver and study mobile maker experiences for people in rural communities in central Wisconsin.

Many policymakers, employers, educators and career services professionals seem to agree that internships are beneficial to college students. President Trump recently lauded the value of apprenticeships, and Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker has considered making internships a mandatory graduation requirement for students in the UW system.

Since the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) began 4-year-old kindergarten (4K) in 2011, more than two-thirds of its kindergarten students have started in its 4K programs. Now, with six full years of operational data on 4K, a new research-practice partnership between MMSD and UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) is taking a close look at the district’s 4K enrollments.

The class of 2030 has just started kindergarten. As four million youngsters across the country begin the first step of education, a new study provides a first-time look at inequalities in school readiness among Wisconsin’s kindergarten students. Researchers from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), part of UW–Madison’s School of Education, compared the literacy skills of Wisconsin’s kindergarten students and found them “far from equally prepared to learn.”